Tobacco material is heated in smoking articles for the purpose of releasing substances contained in the material and delivering these as an aerosol.
In many smoking articles, the heat providing the thermal energy needed to release a smoke aerosol from the tobacco material is provided via the physico-chemical degradation processes that occur during combustion, which may be a combination of oxidative degradation, pyrolysis, pyrosynthesis, and distillation. The thermal energy generated by combustion tends to be high, however, and the amount of heat released is often difficult to control.